Nonnarrative Cinema, ‘Great Flood’ and ‘Visitors,’ on DVD

A shot from Bill Morrison’s wordless film “The Great Flood,” which assembles images from the Mississippi River flood of 1927, a disaster that displaced countless African-Americans.

Icarus Films

By J. HOBERMAN

June 19, 2014

“The Great Flood” and “Visitors,” two monochromatic, wordless, nonnarrative features that opened theatrically this year and are now available for home viewing, aren’t so much avant-garde as anachronistic — although it is that anachronism, the notion of a silent cinematic symphony, that makes them seem avant-garde.

Both “The Great Flood,” a collaboration between the multimedia artist Bill Morrison and the guitarist and composer Bill Frisell, and “Visitors,” directed by Godfrey Reggio and scored by Philip Glass, were initially presented as concerts, with projected images accompanied by live music, a 71-piece orchestra in the case of “Visitors.” Both movies are would-be monuments; each takes as its subject a particular American natural disaster. Scale is an issue, not least in their translation to the small screen.

“The Great Flood,” released on DVD by Icarus Films, is composed almost entirely of archival footage documenting the Mississippi River flood of 1927. The result of the severe storms that struck the South beginning in 1926, this cataclysmic event affected over 16 million acres of land in seven states, inundating the lower Mississippi Delta and displacing as many as a million people, an estimated 90 percent of whom were black.

Mr. Morrison, whose 2002 film “Decasia” was fashioned from and consecrated to decomposing nitrate film footage, here preserves a near-forgotten national trauma. The drowned landscape — submerged houses and telephone poles, people perched on rooftops or rowing down Main Street, Model T’s driving across and cattle being driven through new-formed lakes, towns reduced to mounds of muddy debris — is awe inspiring, although, given the constraints of filming mid-deluge, somewhat less horrific than Faulkner’s description of the flood’s onrushing carcass-clogged waters in his novel “The Wild Palms.”

“The Great Flood” is not a conventional documentary. Explanatory material is sparse. Rather, the footage is organized by subject, with titled sections devoted to sharecroppers, levees, tributaries, evacuation and politicians (notably the future presidential candidate Herbert Hoover, inspecting the damage). Compared with found-footage artists like Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs, or even his own “Decasia,” Mr. Morrison is cautious in his treatment of the material. Aside from the clever entr’acte that pixilates the 1927 Sears Roebuck catalog, the filmmaking is restrained, eschewing the use of overt slow motion or repetition.

An image from Godfrey Reggio’s “Visitors,” which offers a procession of portraits, fastidiously lit and shot in high-definition video, sometimes leaning toward the grim and wary.

Cinedigm

In the absence of strong visual rhythms, the material is shaped largely by Mr. Frisell’s pensive score — a soundtrack “worth savoring as you would a fine recording” Neil Genzlinger wrote in The New York Times last January, when “The Great Flood” opened at the IFC Center. Ruminative rather than dramatic, Mr. Frisell’s guitar-driven accompaniment variously incorporates blues chords and bebop phrasing, while making a leitmotif of Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River.” (First heard in December 1927 when “Show Boat” opened on Broadway, the song was popularly associated with the flood.)

This distancing approach is appropriate in that “The Great Flood” is not so much a disaster film as a disaster mediated. Mr. Morrison cannot show the flood directly but only how the flood was documented in 1927. Much suffering is necessarily hidden, although segregation is apparent — as is the brutal social order most evident in the sections devoted to sharecroppers and levees. What the footage cannot represent is the degree to which the flood affected African-Americans.

Cognizant of this, Mr. Morrison concludes his film with footage of black street musicians and bluesmen in performance. However well intentioned, the coda is weak and frustrating, and here Mr. Frisell’s score feels unwarranted. Whatever the people are singing, it is not “Ol’ Man River.”

Video A scene from Godfrey Reggio’s film featuring a gorilla from the Bronx Zoo named Triska.

“Visitors,” out on a dual Blu-ray/DVD edition from Cinedigm, can be described as a succession of faces, not unlike Andy Warhol’s “screen tests.” It certainly is that, expanding the Warhol paradigm through the inclusion of the Bronx Zoo’s female gorilla Triska, but it is also a meditation on post-Katrina Southern Louisiana, the region where Mr. Reggio grew up.

The portraits are fastidiously lit and, like the entire film, impeccably shot in high-definition video. Lasting about a minute each, they skew toward the grim and wary. Some were shot clandestinely (while people were watching TV or playing video games). Many are glacially slowed down to reduce blinks, twitches and shifts in expression.

Uniformly staring into the camera, Mr. Reggio’s subjects are varied in terms of age and type; they are contextualized by Expressionistic and, at times, digitally manipulated images of flooded bayous, aboveground tombs and New Orleans’s New Deal deco Federal Building: The word “visitor,” carved in stone above one entrance, provides the movie’s title. There are also some fabricated images showing Earth as seen from the moon, but most impressive are the shots taken of New Orleans’s swamped and abandoned Six Flags amusement park.

The film "Visitors," like Mr. Reggio’s 1982 art-house hit, “Koyaanisqatsi,” includes a score by Philip Glass.

Cinedigm

The piece is framed by portraits of Triska and basically held together by Mr. Glass’s typically foreboding score. “There is no overall narrative arc to imagery that might be described as a very sophisticated Rorschach test with an environmentalist subtext,” Stephen Holden noted in The Times when “Visitors” opened at the Sunshine Cinema in January. Occasionally, Mr. Reggio groups his subjects together to create an audience presumably mirroring or confronting the movie’s viewers — a quieter example of the bombastic j’accuse that characterized his 1982 art-house hit, “Koyaanisqatsi.”

“Visitors” means to be transfixing, if not chastening, and, projected on a large screen, may have had the presence of “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “King Kong” (two spectacles that Mr. Reggio evokes). Seen on a monitor, however, it is less than overwhelming. Some images, notably the close-ups of Triska or a flock of gulls in super slow motion, are quite strong. Others are purely ambient — less suggestive of “2001” than a multimillion-dollar screen saver or virtual fish tank.

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